A Simple, Efficient, and Novel Standalone Photovoltaic Inverter Configuration With Reduced Harmonic Distortion

This paper is put forward a novel photovoltaic (PV) inverter topology for maximum solar power utilization, which incorporates a new maximum power point tracking (MPPT) scheme based on shading pattern identification using the artificial neural network, single-input and multi-output (SIMO) converter, and multilevel inverter (MLI). The performance of the proposed MPPT scheme is benchmarked under partially shaded conditions. In continuation, the PV voltage is fed to the SIMO converter, where the converter produces four independent (V
₁
, V
₂
, V
₃
and V
₄
) voltages with different magnitudes. The MLI converts the dc output voltage of the SIMO converter into ac to feed the utility, with reduced harmonic distortion. This MLI consists of eight switching devices and produces thirty one level ac output voltage with very less harmonic distortion. The salient feature associated with the proposed topology is that the proposed MPPT scheme extracts utmost power in any weather conditions and MLI feeds the utility. An experimental prototype is designed and developed to verify the performance of the proposed PV inverter topology. FPGA Spartan trainer kit is used to program pulses required for the MLI and converter of the proposed topology.